Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.

The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.

Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.

The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”

Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400

(edited by) Rotraut Pape – Sixcon_Lost Media

book – Verlag Hochschule ür Gestaltung Offenbach – ISBN 3921997410
The perishability of electronic informations is one of the most ticklish questions of the digital era. New media are strongly tied to the availability of the hardware necessary to enjoy them, and the problem of data conservation is still unresolved and still needs a complex combinationof devices to support many different, sometimes defunct, standards and the supports are volatile. With so much uncertainty, the printouts of the proceedings of these conferences on media archeology are precious. The conferences deal with this theme from a historical and cultural perspective, from many different angles, such as the role of the body as a medium and the difficulties in documenting some works, such as performances. The limbo of recorded materials that can be accessed only recovering their initial conditions is compared to a lost continent. Indeed, if one thinks about the quantity of material recorded on magnetic supports, it’s easy to visualize a melancholic vision of a great and undefined number of works that, inexorably, are in the process of being lost, as if the museums were being slowly invaded by an unbeatable destructive parasite. The loss of memory, that is, of its physical replicability (organically, digitally or analogically) implies a loss of history whose price is definitely too high.